G. Elliot Morris looks at the latest polling and finds Americans are split about the protesters against immigration raids but oppose President Trump’s response more.
And Trump’s approval ratings on immigration and deportations have now turned negative.
CA-30. Former Biden administration official Jake Levine is considering launching an intraparty challenge to Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin reports. Sherman already faces opposition from Democrat Jake Rakov, one of his former staffers, in the top-two primary for California’s safely blue 30th District. Levine is the son of former Rep. Mel Levine, who represented part of the Los Angeles area from 1983 through 1993. The younger Levine, who does not appear to have sought elected office before, rose to become the Biden administration’s senior director for climate and energy.
IL-08. Former Commerce Department official Dan Tully on Wednesday joined the crowded Democratic primary for Illinois’ 8th District, which Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi is giving up to run for the Senate. Tully, a former judge advocate in the U.S. Army Reserve, said he recently left his post at Commerce because Donald Trump “is a danger to our country, our economy and our democratic way of life.”
MI-07. Education policy professor Josh Cowen, who teaches at Michigan State University, tells the Detroit News he’s considering seeking the Democratic nomination to take on GOP Rep. Tom Barrett. Cowen, who said he’d have more to say in the next few weeks, is one of several Democrats looking at running for Michigan’s swingy 7th District.
GA-05. Former Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill, who served 10 months in federal prison after he was convicted in 2022 of violating the civil rights of prisoners he oversaw, announced Tuesday that he’d wage a longshot Democratic primary challenge to Rep. Nikema Williams. Hill, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes, was found guilty of punishing detainees by strapping them into restraint chairs for hours, and he’s currently being sued over his actions. The former sheriff, though, says that the inmates he was incarcerated with were the ones who came up with the idea of him running for Georgia’s safely blue 5th District.
TN-07. Two Tennessee Republicans have launched campaigns to succeed GOP Rep. Mark Green, who said Monday he’d resign at some unspecified time after the passage of the GOP’s pending budget bill. Matt Van Epps stepped down from Gov. Bill Lee’s cabinet on Tuesday to run, while Montgomery County Commissioner Jason Knight announced a bid the following day. State Sen. Bill Powers and state Rep. Jody Barrett also tell the Tennessee Lookout’s Sam Stockard that they’re interested in running for the conservative 7th District, though Barrett professed to lack any “burning desire to climb any political ladder or get to the next proverbial level.”
Former state Rep. Brandon Ogles, the cousin of neighboring Rep. Andy Ogles, also said he was thinking about running. Stockard adds that state Rep. Gino Bulso has been talked about as a possible candidate, but said he was unable to reach the legislator.
No one’s sure exactly when the special election to replace Green will be, though, especially since the incumbent won’t even say what he’s doing next beyond joining the “private sector.”
Green’s colleagues tell NOTUS’ Reese Gorman that the still-congressman has approached them about investing in the South American nation of Guyana, but, in the words of one source, he’s been “super cagey” about providing details. Gorman adds that Green, the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has utilized his “connections to try to land meetings with potential investors.”
Green, who reportedly announced his upcoming departure while in Guyana, responded by insisting he’d followed House ethics rules and “never solicited a lobbyist or executive to purchase a company I own, or am planning to own, or am planning to work for.” Not everyone in the GOP caucus, though, is appeased.
“What the fuck?” an unnamed member exclaimed to Gorman. “How do you line up a job before you resign?”
A surprising number of Democrats have expressed interest in taking aim at an unlikely target: Tennessee’s conservative 7th District, which is set to become vacant following Republican Rep. Mark Green’s announcement this week that he’d resign at an unspecified later date.
The 7th District backed Donald Trump 60-38 last year, and Green turned in an identical performance even after his estranged wife accused him of infidelity.
But Democrats, as James Downs writes in the National Journal, are encouraged by their big overperformances in recent special elections. They’re also hoping that the GOP’s decision to gerrymander the neighboring 5th District in 2022, which involved cracking the loyally blue city of Nashville three ways and placing part of it in Green’s district, will give them a large and motivated base of voters for what could be a low-turnout contest.
State Rep. Vincent Dixie sounds the most enthusiastic about running, and he tells the Tennessee Lookout’s Sam Stockard he’s “about 98.3% sure” he’ll do it. Fellow state Rep. Bo Mitchell also informs the Nashville Scene that he’s thinking about a bid and will decide “in the coming days.”
In addition, former Nashville Mayor Megan Barry, who was Green’s opponent last year, released a statement saying she was thinking about another try. State Rep. John Ray Clemmons, for his part, told Stockard the party should consolidate behind one candidate, but he didn’t say if he wants to be that candidate.
Stockard and Downs also name several other possible Democratic contenders, including former Nashville Mayor John Cooper, businessman Darden Copeland, former Tennessee State University President Glenda Glover, Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts, and state Sen. Jeff Yarbro. State Sen. Charlane Oliver, though, tells Stockard she won’t run.
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to pile into the primary for the as-yet unscheduled special election. The latest entrant is Army veteran Jon Thorp, who announced on Thursday. Thorp, though, admitted that he hasn’t cast a ballot in 24 years because he was unhappy with his choices, a decision that’s unlikely to go over well with Trump-obsessed primary voters.
Two other candidates were already seeking the GOP nod: former state cabinet member Matt Van Epps and Montgomery County Commissioner Jason Knight, an Army veteran who would be the first Black Republican to represent the state in Congress.
A few other Republicans previously expressed interest in running, and several more are now talking about entering the race.
Michael Lotfi, an official with the state branch of Americans for Prosperity, tells Stockard that he’s both considering and would be a “pretty flawed candidate.”
Lotfi offered that blunt self-assessment six years after GOP lawmakers expressed disgust that then-House Speaker Glen Casada gave him a state job even though he’d be doing no work for the legislature. Lotfi instead was brought on to handle political work for Casada, which included launching attacks on women who had accused one of the speaker’s allies of sexual assault. Casada stepped down later in 2019 because of an unrelated scandal.
Republican operative Alice Rolli, meanwhile, tells Axios’ Nate Rau that she’s thinking about running. Rolli campaigned for mayor of Nashville in 2023 but badly lost the officially nonpartisan contest to Democrat Freddie O’Connell.
Stockard and Rau also mention several other Republicans as possible contenders, including a trio of political operatives—Chris Burger, Brian Clifford, and Mark Moore—as well as country singer John Rich and House Speaker Cameron Sexton. However, none of these people, including Rich of the duo Big & Rich, has said anything publicly about running.
VA-01. Democratic activist Lisa Vedernikova Khanna, a former chief of staff to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, announced Wednesday that she would challenge Republican Rep. Rob Wittman in Virginia’s 1st District. The first-time candidate used her announcement to emphasize her background as the daughter of an undocumented immigrant from the former Soviet Union.
Khanna entered the race just days after Chesterfield Clerk of Court Amanda Pohl became the first Democrat to challenge Wittman, whose district includes many of Richmond’s suburbs as well as the western Chesapeake Bay. This district backed Donald Trump 52-47 after favoring him by a slightly wider spread in 2020, making this a rare district that moved to the left last year.
VA-11. A super PAC supporting Fairfax County Supervisor James Walkinshaw has released a poll showing him with a huge 41-8 lead over state Sen. Stella Pekarsky in the June 28 “firehouse” primary that Democrats are holding to choose a nominee, with six other candidates trailing still further. This survey from Lake Research Partners, which was first shared by Punchbowl News, is the first poll we’ve seen of this month’s contest. Whoever wins a plurality of the vote will be heavily favored in the Sept. 9 special election for Virginia’s 11th District.
Energy policy expert Amy Roma has released her first TV ad ahead of the June 28 Democratic primary in Virginia’s vacant 11th District, saying she “know[s] how to use all those levers of power to stop Trump’s agenda” and promising to “jam up every single dangerous and illegal Trump policy in Congress and the courts.”
In a poll of the race recently released by allies of Fairfax County Supervisor James Walkinshaw, who was the first Democrat on the airwaves, Roma was shown taking just 1% of the vote. Walkinshaw, meanwhile, had a giant 41-8 lead over his nearest opponent, state Sen. Stella Pekarsky.
AZ-01. In a wide-ranging piece about potential House candidates with nontraditional backgrounds, Nathan Gonzales reports that Army veteran Jimmy McCain has decided not to enter the busy Democratic primary to take on Republican Rep. David Schweikert. McCain, who is the son of the late Sen. John McCain, registered as a Democrat and backed Kamala Harris last fall.
Gonzales has far more information about other possible congressional hopefuls, so we encourage you to read his article.
Separately, finance executive Conor O’Callaghan took his name out of contention on Thursday by endorsing former TV anchor Marlene Galan-Woods’ campaign. Both ran in 2024, with Galan-Woods and O’Callaghan placing third and fourth in the Democratic primary, respectively.
FL-05.Conservative podcaster Mark Kaye, a former radio host in the Jacksonville area, said this week that he would challenge Rep. John Rutherford in the Republican primary for Florida’s conservative 5th District.
Kaye attracted attention last year when he said he’d been “fired” by Cox Media for creating and spreading an AI-generated image of Donald Trump surrounded by Black voters. The company, though, said it had already decided to part ways with him before the incident.
Rutherford is a longtime elected official from Jacksonville who served as its sheriff before he was elected to the House in 2016. Last year, he won renomination by a 67-33 margin against an underfunded opponent, a performance that was neither close but also not impressive for a veteran incumbent.
Kaye, though, is wasting no time attacking the 72-year-old congressman. The challenger declared, “The only thing this guy fights for is the last cup of jello at the congressional cafeteria, plus he’s one of the least transparent congressmen in the entire world.”
FL-19. Chris Collins, who has served both as a U.S. representative from New York and as an inmate in federal prison, has decided to add Florida congressman to his resume.
Collins said Wednesday that he’d enter the Republican primary for the open 19th District, a dark-red seat that includes Fort Myers and the Cape Coral areas. Considerably more of Collins’ former voters may know about this than his future voters, though, as he made his announcement on WBEN—a talk radio station in Buffalo.
“Trump’s back in office,” he told host Joe Beamer. “I’d like to go back and be his sidekick, if you will.” Collins is running to succeed Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, who is the frontrunner to become Florida’s next governor.
Collins, who turned 75 last month, is a longtime upstate New York politician who won a House seat in 2012 by unseating future Gov. Kathy Hochul. His career seemed to be over, though, in 2019 when he resigned and pleaded guilty to his part in an insider-trading scheme.
“People feel sorry for me. They shouldn’t,” a tearful Collins told the court at his sentencing. “I stand here today as a disgraced former member of Congress that will have that asterisk by my name.”
Donald Trump, though, did feel sorry for Collins, who was one of the first members of Congress to endorse his 2016 presidential bid. In 2020, Trump pardoned the ex-congressman just two months into what was supposed to be a 26-month prison sentence.
Collins, who relocated to southwestern Florida, also left whatever contrition he’d once felt behind. He told the Washington Post last year, “They came after me like they came after Trump.”
Collins has now entered a GOP primary that includes Jim Oberweis—who is a former state senator from Illinois—as well as Marine veteran Mike Pedersen and businessman Jim Schwartzel.
Collins, however, may not be the only one-time Republican congressman from another state who wants redemption in Florida. Former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who had his own turbulent tenure, expressed interest in seeking Donalds’ seat back in February. Cawthorn, however, doesn’t appear to have said anything else about a comeback over the intervening months.
NH-01. Former state Sen. Tom Sherman, who had been considering a bid for New Hampshire’s open 1st Congressional District, has instead endorsed former Portsmouth City Councilor Stefany Shaheen. Sherman has also been weighing a run against Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte but doesn’t appear to have said anything further since first floating the idea last month.
MO-02. Former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright said Wednesday that he would not challenge Republican Rep. Ann Wagner as a Democrat next year. Wainwright, whose name was included in a recent Democratic poll testing prospective candidates against Wagner, didn’t rule out a future campaign for office in comments to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But the former right-handed hurler, who has not said which party, if any, he belongs to, added that the “time for me, if ever, is not right now.”
MA-09.Mattapoisett Select Board member Tyler Macallister, who is better known as the star of the reality TV show “Harpoon Hunters,” told local Republicans this week that he would challenge Democratic Rep. Bill Keating in Massachusetts’ 9th District. This constituency, which includes Cape Cod, is the least Democratic of the Bay State’s nine congressional districts, but it still tilts to the left. Kamala Harris prevailed here 55-44.
IL-09.Democratic operative Miracle Jenkins, who worked for retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s reelection campaign in 2018, has joined the race to succeed his one-time boss. Four other notable Democrats are vying to succeed the congresswoman in Illinois’ solidly blue 9th District.
OH-13. Every Republican in Ohio’s congressional delegation, including Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, has endorsed former state Sen. Kevin Coughlin as he seeks a rematch with Democratic Rep. Emilia Sykes following his 51-49 loss last year. Coughlin is the only Republican candidate in the race, and no other potential names have emerged.
The Akron-area 13th District was the most evenly divided district on the presidential level in 2024, going for Kamala Harris by just 183 votes—a difference of less than 0.05 percentage points. However, the district could change if Republicans seek to gerrymander Ohio’s map further this summer, when state law requires them to pass new lines. Democrats have urged the GOP to maintain the status quo and re-pass the existing map.
